The Grief Performance

PubDate: 3/1/2011

ISBN: 9781880834947

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $15.95

Quantity Available: 112

Pages: 72

SKU #: J07B

Poetry. "Emily Kendal Frey performs grief and dread as a graceful dance, the kind the tree you cut down in your backyard might do on your heart. This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as 'The End,' which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to 'Walk towards the light.' See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book."—Rae Amrantrout

Author City: PORTLAND, OR USA

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of two full-length collections, SORROW ARROW (Octopus Books, 2014), and THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and the chapbooks Frances (Poor Claudia, 2010), The New Planet (Mindmade Books, 2010), and Airport (Blue Hour, 2009), as well as three chapbook collaborations. Frey's THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE was selected for the Cleveland State Poetry Center's 2010 First Book Prize by Rae Armantrout. She also won the Poetry Society of America's 2012 Norma Farber First Book Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

“I've always found Kendal Frey’s poems fascinating to the point of transfixthey make compelling reading: I’ve never started one I didn’t finish, something I can say of very few other poets’ work. Her first full-length collection surely places her among the most brilliant of today’s young poets. THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE commands and rewards the mind’s richest attendance.”
Bill Knott

“Emily Kendal Frey’s THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.”
Dorothea Lasky

“Emily Kendal Frey’s poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.”
Zachary Schomburg